LITMIR.BIZ

       Books

      They did not fail me. They opened new worlds and kept the existing one at bay. Books were my fortress; I could hole up inside of them. Better than that, they were portable. I brought books everywhere: summer camp, Sunday drives, errands with my mother, even the bathroom.

      I read the usual suspects: Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Black Beauty, Louisa May Alcott (whose Little Women made me cry, but whose Little Men I finished only from a sense of duty). I read indiscriminately. Dickens of course and Aesop and the My Book House series from my mother’s childhood with their elongated yellow and black illustrations of fairies and elves. But also Archie comic books, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, my grandparents’ Reader’s Digest, (“I Am Joe’s Kidney,” “Grizzly Bear Attack: Drama in Real Life”) and an entire gothic series about a family named Falcon that lived under a curse borne down generations by its female members, who were moody, beautiful, and extravagantly wicked. Weekends, summers, school vacations, I stayed in my room reading. If I were being punished, my mother would send me to Chipper’s room, where the only things to read were a children’s encyclopedia set, some Mad magazines, and a book about football. I read those, too.

      My favorite book was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Every week during fourth grade I checked it out of the school library except for one brief period when the librarian made me stop, insisting that I needed to give the other kids a chance to read it. For weeks the book stayed on the shelf, out of bounds, until, sick of my pestering, the librarian relented.

      I loved the Greek gods. Their violence and glamour and pure weirdness topped anything in the Bible or on TV. They rode dolphins, wore winged sandals, turned themselves into animals. I lived in a world of banal heroes: flying, punching comic book figures with their masks and capes—Batman, Superman, Spiderman—boy heroes like Underdog with his simpering girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred; sports heroes who made my father jump up screaming from the couch during weekend games. On sitcoms there were heroines: genies and witches who yearned to be housewives. So what if Jeannie and Samantha had magic powers when all they wanted—all women were supposed to want—was to wash dishes and make beds?

      The Greek goddesses, though, had no desire to stay on Mount Olympus baking pies. My favorite was Athena. Goddess of wisdom and the arts, she’d sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head. No one told her what to do and no one dared mock her. Just look at what she’d done to poor Arachne, shrunken to a spider for disparaging the gods. Yet Athena was not casually cruel like Artemis, nor jealous like Hera, and she certainly didn’t lose her head over men the way Aphrodite did. Not only that, she carried an owl on her shoulder and wore a breastplate made from Medusa’s severed head. I wanted to be just like her. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths said she had gray eyes; mine were blue-gray, close enough. I pretended our cat was an owl and tried to balance her on my shoulder, which didn’t really work. I wore belts with giant buckles, imagining they were the Medusa head. One cross word, one dirty look, and I would turn my tormentor into stone.

      Reading whetted my appetite. The more I read, the hungrier for words I became. In books, too, I found an inherent sense of justice, the triumph of the downcast. Andersen’s duckling may have been ugly, Oliver Twist abandoned, Jo March eccentric and poor, yet somehow they prevailed. The scorned, the deformed, the misunderstood, I rooted for them all. And, inevitably, I began to wonder about their creators. Someone had crafted each book I read, crafting in the process a writer’s life. Eventually it occurred to me that this making of books was a serious thing, a way of reshaping the world.

      I began to write as randomly as I read: journals, lyrics, odes to nature, fairy tales, stories about girls overcoming all types of adversity. Aside from school assignments, I kept my writing to myself, suspecting, perhaps rightly, the perplexity it would cause my family. No one I knew wrote; why on earth would they? The adults I saw did serious, practical work. The women taught school or worked in beauty salons or as secretaries. The men had more exciting options. My father, who worked as a private detective, kept a gun in a shoebox on his bedroom closet shelf. I’d discovered it while rummaging through my mother’s dresses and wigs. I imagined car chases, shoot outs with bad guys, all kinds of glamorous things to write about. The gun scared me, and I never told anyone I’d found it. But when I asked my mother in a roundabout way what, exactly, my father did for a living, I was disappointed to learn it had nothing to do with chasing bad guys and instead involved something called “insurance fraud” and (I later learned) the occasional wandering spouse. It was impossible to imagine the adults I knew hiding in some attic like Jo March or Hans Christian Andersen, chomping on apples and thinking about things. Besides, there were hardly any books in our home. True, my grandmother made weekly trips to the library, mostly for mysteries, and, true again, my mother’s parents had a huge stack of Reader’s Digest magazines. But the biggest collections of books in our extended family belonged to me.

      My mother, while proud of my grades, worried about my increasing isolation. She urged me to go outside and make friends the way my brother did. Athletic and affable, Chipper collected friends like I collected, well, books. Nearly every week he’d come home from school with some new classmate. They’d ride bikes, make cardboard forts, shoot marbles, flip baseball cards—none of which interested me. Once in a while, though, because they were younger, I could cajole them into playing some game of my own invention. We’d play Circe and I’d turn them into swine. Or Dream Game, in which I’d have everyone pretend to sleep while I acted out my dreams of the previous night. These games never lasted long. My brother and his friends got tired of being transformed into livestock or having to snore on command. Your sister’s games, they complained, are really stupid.

      One afternoon, fed up with the way I “moped around the house,” my mother made me call up a girl who lived two streets away. Squat and loud, a nose picker who never read anything at all, the girl repulsed me. Do it! my mother said, holding out the receiver. Do it or you can spend the entire week in your brother’s room. I’d already read everything in there including the baseball cards. So I caved. The neighborhood girl and I spent a desultory hour or two playing Barbies until I managed to fob her off on Chipper, who was always happy to have another kid around. Then I snuck off to my room to read.